City Kid Chronicles: From East Village to, uh, Actual Village
For the past few years, Sam, Srilekha, and I have all been living in New York, a place where the word “village” refers to a kind of cultural hamlet, a neighborhood with a certain self-conscious style and character. The West Village has its French bistros and handbag boutiques and narrow ivy-wrapped brick apartments, the East Village has its laced-up leather and its vegan organic noodle joints.
In the West Village, you can go to your local greenmarket to buy milk that comes in a glass bottle printed with the name of an upstate farm in antique lettering. In the village of Vikravandi, Tamil Nadu, you can walk out of the kitchen to the organic farm in the backyard and milk a cow that you thought was male until you found yourself tugging at its udders. You can take tamarind from the tamarind tree and eggplant from the eggplant bush and dal from the lentil vine and make dosas and sambhar for dinner, under the discriminating eye of Velangani, the masterchef auntie who cooks in the kitchen. You’ve got a Discovery Channel on your front verandah, where you can watch the entire cycle of life and death in insect form (it appears to be bug-breeding season these days in Vikravandi). There’s a red-mouthed guinea hen who wanders in and out of the house and attacks if you reach for the eggs in its nest. People walk and work barefoot.
In the daytime, men in lunghis bike down the road balancing unlikely quantities of iron wire on the tops of their heads. At night, when the candles burn down, men and women carry cots from their palm-thatched concrete houses and relocate outside to sleep where it’s cooler. When you meet somebody new, they’ll ask you, “What’s your name?” and “What do you do?” and then, invariably, “Have you eaten?”
And by "milking," I mean watching a pro do most of it in 10 minutes and then awkwardly struggling with the cow on my own for another 10 minutes.
Dosa-making with Velangani.
I saw a lifestyle, a pace, a set of everyday rituals that I’ve never seen before. So I was excited to make videos with our students, because the topics of their videos were things I was curious to know: What’s your village like? Your school? Daily routine?
Here are two of the videos they came up with:
1) Our Home
Interview poker-faces.
Meet the students of St. Peter Paul Home for Disabled Children, a government-aided residential school in Mugaiyur, Tamil Nadu. In this video, they tour us around their school and speak about the difficulties they’ve faced as handicapped students in rural Tamil Nadu, their experiences finding a community at St. Peter Paul, and their ambitions for the future. Plus, they’ll show you their singing and dancing chops (which, frankly, put mine to shame. When they asked me to show them my dance moves, I changed the subject.)
Link to video here: http://vimeo.com/30616854
2) One Day in My Life
4th-grade hooligans.
They may appear pint-sized, but the 4th- and 5th-class kids of St. Antony’s Primary School are very busy people–and are capable of offering PBS-documentary-worthy reenactments of a day in the life of a primary school hooligan.
Link to video here: http://vimeo.com/30557432
Staff Digital Storytelling Training at Communities Rising
One of our goals in continuing the partnership between The Modern Story and Communities Rising is to train staff to carry out the same type of workshops that we conduct to teach students to use the cameras in order to brainstorm, write, shoot and produce their own short video narratives. In the spirit of creating a sustainable, long-term digital story-telling program, we conducted staff training with all of the Communities Rising teachers and walked them through the process of producing a short film, so that they might replicate that process in the classroom with students.
We began with the brainstorming process where we had each staff member share out an idea for a video topic and then conducted a blind vote to select the top three ideas. Each TMS teacher directed a group in producing a short film on the three winning topics:
- Child Labor
- Differences in Schooling Between The City and The Village
- Effects of Technology and Media on Children
We planned the format and sequence of our videos in our first meeting and made arrangements to carry out those plans at the three hour staff training the following Saturday. When the time came, we quickly introduced those teachers to the camera who did not have experience. There was a wide disparity in the technological knowledge of the group. Some teachers came to the group with a clear-cut vision of what the video would look like and a plan to shoot and edit advanced scenes and sequences. Others had never taken photographs or video with either camera and had a vague, yet eager, sense of what we were trying to produce.
Each group gelled in its own unique way as leaders emerged to complete each task and less experienced teachers asked questions and contributed their ideas. The grounds at SAMSSS were transformed into an impromptu studio as members of all three groups ran around planning, shooting, directing large groups of school children, and speeding off to shoot scenes on location. It was a very exciting and inspiring atmosphere, and extremely productive when you consider the fact that we were able to shoot all the necessary video footage and introduce editing in only 3 hours.
My own group worked on a video about child labor. In our planning session, we decided it would be most powerful if we could tell the story of a child who had been directly affected and pulled out of school to work. A teacher knew one boy and promised to bring him along to the training the following week. Sure enough, she showed up with Vikram and he was a great sport and brave young man for showing us around a brick factory similar to the one he had worked in, and answering questions to help raise awareness about the issue of child labor. Although he was in fourth grade, Vikram looked more like a seven year old to me, and it broke my heart to see footage of him hauling clay for bricks at the factory, knowing that he had been forced by circumstances to grow up so fast. The good news is that Vikram is back in school and with the help of his teachers and their film, raising awareness about the problem of child labor in India.
As our two week stay at CR wraps up after today, it is sad to go, but I know that we are leaving a very competent and committed organization behind that will pick up where we left off in our digital media curriculum. I look forward to seeing the finished product of the Analadi Hostel boys’ “Discipline” video that Shiva will work on shooting and editing with them when they return from the break.
Communities Rising Staff: Child Labor from The Modern Story on Vimeo.
